Adverts will be presented on nine rectangles that appear on new page, and will be based on users’ most frequent and recent websites.

Firefox VP Johnathan Nightingale said that ‘a lot of our community’ were confused by the language contained in the original announcement, and worried that Firefox would be turned into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without any user control or benefit.

"That’s not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla," Nightingale said.

"But we will experiment. In the coming weeks, we’ll be landing tests on our pre-release channels to see whether we can make things like the new tab page more useful, particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any recommendations to make from your history."

Mozilla however clarified that the test is not about revenue, but to discover what features are liked by users and what is ignored or disabled.

"Sponsorship would be the next stage once we are confident that we can deliver user value."